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But a blast of cheerful California sunshine may be starting to light the way in the form of an underground gang of young, conservative hackers in the Valley assembling via a communal Google Document to brainstorm about what they can do to save the party from the clutches of tech-phobic leaders.

“There’s this myth that there aren’t any Republicans out here who are willing to drop everything to help the way Democratic hackers have,” said Aaron Ginn, who with Garrett Johnson have dubbed their nascent brain trust the Republican Stealth Mob. “We’re out here, and we want to help.”

Although the Mob exists almost entirely online, Ginn said more than 50 programmers and other techies are ready to help build new tools to modernize the party’s widely panned digital infrastructure. Many of those on the list are secret conservatives at top companies fearful of “coming out” in the über-liberal Bay Area, Ginn said.

Already, Ginn and Johnson have had audiences with some significant GOP figures including New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s campaign manager, Mike DuHaime, and top Republican campaign strategists Patrick Ruffini and Vince Harris.

What makes this gang different from the myriad of existing GOP digital strategy firms with hanging shingles in Washington is that the Silicon Valley bunch isn’t in it for the money and they’re not as interested in political gamesmanship as they are in creating useful and usable campaign tools. They look upon the much-vaunted Obama tech team not with contempt but with admiration over its impressive sites, sleek apps and intuitive systems.

Ginn, 24, director of growth for StumbleUpon, and Johnson, 28, co-founder of SendHub, are typical.

“This is a unique group that wants to help and wants to lend their expertise — and they all have day jobs,” DuHaime said after meeting Ginn and Johnson at a Christie fundraiser hosted by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. “There’s a chance for them to do some things for us that are not always typical for Republicans.”

Johnson agreed: “The people who provide advice in D.C. are part of the consulting industrial complex. It’s an honorable living, but that’s how they make their income. We’re technologists.”

That altruistic earnestness, coupled with Ginn’s own personal story of his time inside the Mitt Romney digital campaign, give this effort credibility to many of those on the right seeking to understand what went wrong in 2012.

Ginn left a Silicon Valley startup for which he was a late co-founder to move to Boston last July. A self-described religious conservative and former head of the College Republicans at Texas Christian University, he was propelled in particular by his outrage over the Supreme Court’s affirmation of Obamacare in June.

Troubles began almost immediately. He learned that the campaign’s online home, MittRomney.com, was built on an archaic architecture that required the entire site to be updated every time most changes were made. That made the site more prone to crashing and made rapid response more cumbersome, as evidenced by the lag of days before the front of the site touted Romney’s triumph in the first presidential debate.

He said his offer to re-code the site was turned down. He had been hired to manage and grow something called MyMitt, a little-used program intended to help rank-and-file volunteers raise money. MyMitt was clunky and unpleasant, Ginn said, so he laid out an $80,000 proposal to bring in four Republican computer engineers to build something new. The campaign at first was encouraging but then decided after a week to nix it.